03-05-2022, 07:21 PM
Amet
When Amet had realized the smokey black mare standing before him in the meadow was Ciri, everything else had fallen away. The wildlife, the meadow, the distant trees, the sky that slowly turned blue as the morning continued to progress. Only Ciri has stood in crystal-clear focus since the very moment they’d connected eyes again after all of those years. Even her crimson stars, hovering around her winged frame like ambient protectors, had gone unnoticed until now. They start to throb with new intensity as he offers reassurance that he is not Gale, whoever that may be. Gale, who she is fearful of. Gale, who could fashion himself a face of Ciri’s past. Gale, who had caused her enough harm that she recoils to protect herself behind dark feathered wings until the moment she knows that he is not a source of her fear, but instead, a source of her rage.
Those crimson stars gleam with the power of the heavens as Ciri lowers her wings, removing that protective barrier from between them to reveal the history of pain that sits written upon her skin. Were it not for the anger that ignites her swirling silver eyes, Amet would have gasped at the fine white scars that cut across nearly every part of her. She had suffered since they had last crossed paths - both by him, and by something much more omnipotent. But it’s the rage and how swiftly it grows that keeps the golden stallion’s attention. It’s in the flare of her eyes and the tension in her muscles, the set of her jaw and the starlit wings that fan out to encompass the majority of his field of vision. Amet does not move, though his muscles instinctively steel himself against whatever is to come.
Where is my son?
In the midst of her anger, a vague thought interrupts Amet’s thoughts. As if he’s forgotten something. Something important. Something related to Takhar? Unlikely. But he still cannot place it - even as he finds his words again, his sharp-lined face remains pensive. “Traveling, the last I knew.” Amet does not doubt that his answer will not be enough for Ciri, but the beautiful boy they had created together has been his own man for years. A wandering one, at that.
He had taken after Jah-Lilah in that way.
The scarred woman, his former lover, stalks closer and he wonders, disconnected, what he will do if she decides to deal with her anger through violence. Though the remorse he feels for the actions of his youth remains, he wonders if his instinct will be to allow her to cause that physical pain, or if it will be to fight.
A lifetime spent away. He no longer knows himself.
And then that elusive thought clicks, the one that had been fluttering just at the edges of his mind - the ability he’d possessed only in Beqanna. He feels it unfurl in the back of his mind, his nihilism, but he hesitates.
Could he bring himself to use it on Ciri, on the woman who’d fought herself through death time and time again? On the woman he had loved, still loves, more than anything?
“Ciri,” his voice soft and low, “What answers do you need?” How can we both find closure?
Aren’t you tired, so tired, of feeling this anger?
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
@Ciri
